50 Fun Facts About Famous Artists

Which painter cut off part of his own left ear with a razor in the French town of Arles?

Vincent van Gogh wrapped the severed ear in paper and delivered it to a woman at a local brothel after a row with Paul Gauguin. He later painted himself with the bandage on.

Which portrait did Louvre worker Vincenzo Peruggia steal in 1911 and hide in his apartment for two years?

The Mona Lisa owes much of its worldwide fame to the theft. Peruggia, an Italian patriot who thought it belonged in Italy, was caught when he tried to sell it to a gallery director there.

Which artist's 'Girl with Balloon' began shredding itself moments after selling at a Sotheby's auction in 2018?

Banksy had hidden a shredder in the bottom of the frame, and it stopped about halfway through the canvas, which the artist says was unplanned. The piece was renamed 'Love Is in the Bin'.

Which pop artist painted 32 Campbell's soup cans, one for each variety, for a Los Angeles gallery show?

Andy Warhol said he had eaten the same lunch every day for twenty years. The gallery showed the canvases in a single row on narrow ledges, like grocery items on a shelf.

Which objects droop and melt across the landscape of Salvador Dalí's painting 'The Persistence of Memory'?

Pocket watches gone soft became his best-known image. Dalí said they were inspired by a Camembert cheese melting in the sun, not by the theory of relativity.

Which artist began to paint at 18 while confined to bed for three months after a bus accident?

Frida Kahlo worked lying down at an easel her mother had specially made, with a mirror fixed above it so she could paint herself. About a third of her paintings are self-portraits.

Which sculpture is the only work Michelangelo ever signed, after hearing it credited to another sculptor?

The Pietà carries his name on the sash that runs across Mary's chest. By Giorgio Vasari's account, Michelangelo added it after overhearing the statue attributed to Cristoforo Solari.

Which Edvard Munch painting was stolen from an Oslo gallery on the opening day of the 1994 Winter Olympics?

The Scream was taken by two men who left a note reading 'Thanks for the poor security'. Police recovered it undamaged within three months in a sting operation.

Which animals sit around a card table in Cassius Marcellus Coolidge's paintings commissioned to advertise cigars?

Dogs play poker in the best-known pictures, from a 1903 set of sixteen oil paintings made for the firm Brown & Bigelow. They became a byword for kitsch home decoration in America.

Which French painter's hazy harbour scene 'Impression, Sunrise' gave the Impressionist movement its name?

Claude Monet said the picture could not really pass for a view of Le Havre, his hometown, so he told the catalogue to 'put Impression'. Critic Louis Leroy then used the word for the whole show.

Which Renaissance artist wrote most of his notes in mirror-image script and painted 'The Last Supper' in Milan?

Leonardo da Vinci painted the mural in tempera rather than true fresco so that he could keep revising it. The method failed: the paint was already starting to flake by 1517.

Which Pablo Picasso painting did he ask New York's Museum of Modern Art to keep until democracy returned to Spain?

Guernica answered the 1937 bombing of a Basque town by Nazi Germany's Condor Legion. The huge canvas stayed in New York until 1981, when it reached Madrid in time for the centenary of his birth.

Which Dutch painter of 'Girl with a Pearl Earring' worked so slowly that fewer than forty paintings are firmly his?

Johannes Vermeer earned his living mainly as an art dealer in Delft. The girl is nobody in particular: the picture is a tronie, a Dutch study of a head that was never meant as a portrait.

Which Japanese artist's print 'The Great Wave off Kanagawa' opens a series of thirty-six views of Mount Fuji?

Hokusai went by at least thirty names in his lifetime, more than any other major Japanese artist. The deep Prussian blue he used in the series changed Japanese printmaking.

Which sculptor first made 'The Thinker' as a figure called 'The Poet' for a doorway named 'The Gates of Hell'?

Auguste Rodin built the doorway around Dante's 'Divine Comedy' and sat the brooding figure at its centre, above the doors. The first of the familiar large bronze casts was made in 1904.

Which painter posed his sister and the family dentist as the stern farm pair in 'American Gothic'?

Grant Wood spotted a small white house in Eldon, Iowa, and painted 'the kind of people' he fancied should live in it. His sister insisted the pair were father and daughter, not husband and wife.

Which city has kept Michelangelo's marble 'David' indoors at its Galleria dell'Accademia since 1873?

Florence first stood the statue outdoors, in the square in front of its seat of government, where it was unveiled in 1504. It had been commissioned for the roofline of the cathedral.

Which Pacific island did former stockbroker Paul Gauguin sail for in 1891 to escape European civilisation?

Tahiti was then a French colony, and Gauguin set off promising to return a rich man. He ended his days even farther out in the Pacific, in the Marquesas Islands.

Which performers appear in more than half of the works of the French artist Edgar Degas?

Ballet dancers let him study movement, and he took the theme into sculpture too. His wax 'Little Dancer' was shown in 1881 dressed in a real tutu, slippers and a wig of human hair.

Which fruit hovers in front of the bowler-hatted man's face in René Magritte's painting 'The Son of Man'?

Apple, and a green one: Magritte painted the picture as a self-portrait, and the man's eyes can just be seen peeking over the edge of the fruit.

Which American painter laid his canvases flat on the floor and dripped household paint over them from all sides?

Jackson Pollock was dubbed 'Jack the Dripper' by Time magazine in 1956. He began working this way after moving to Springs, New York, and it let him get at a picture from every angle.

Which Austrian painter added real gold leaf to 'The Kiss' during what scholars call his Golden Period?

Gustav Klimt also worked silver and platinum into the canvas, painted in 1907 and 1908. It hangs in the Upper Belvedere palace in Vienna.

Which movement did Pablo Picasso and Georges Braque pioneer, showing a subject from several viewpoints at once?

Cubism owes its name to the critic Louis Vauxcelles, who wrote in 1908 that Braque reduced places, figures and houses 'to geometric schemas, to cubes'.

Which American painter's 'Nighthawks' shows four people in a brightly lit downtown diner on a dark, deserted street?

Edward Hopper sold the picture within months of finishing it, for $3,000. The scene is said to be based on a since-demolished diner in Greenwich Village, his Manhattan neighbourhood.

Which US state became Georgia O'Keeffe's home in 1949, after years of painting its landscapes and animal skulls?

New Mexico was her home for the rest of her life, at a house in Abiquiú and a summer home at Ghost Ranch. She had been spending part of each year in the Southwest since 1929.

Which plumbing fixture, signed 'R. Mutt', is 'Fountain', the 1917 readymade credited to Marcel Duchamp?

Urinal: a porcelain one, entered under a pseudonym for a New York show whose rules accepted every artist who paid the fee. The board hid it from view all the same.

Which Italian painter showed a goddess arriving on a giant scallop shell in 'The Birth of Venus'?

Botticelli painted the scene in tempera on canvas, a cheaper support than the wooden panels he normally used. The goddess stands newly born yet fully grown, as tradition had it.

Which Rembrandt painting of a militia company was trimmed on all four sides in 1715 for a move to Amsterdam Town Hall?

The Night Watch lost a strip of its left side, the top of its arch and the edge of a step to the trimming. The missing pieces have never been found.

Which French painter built 'A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte' from countless tiny dots of colour?

Georges Seurat worked on it from 1884 to 1886 and preferred to call his method Divisionism. The picture later inspired Stephen Sondheim's Broadway musical 'Sunday in the Park with George'.

Which French artist, left reliant on a wheelchair by cancer surgery in 1941, developed a new art of paper cut-outs?

Henri Matisse worked out the method with paper and scissors during three months spent bedridden. His first major cut-out project was the artist's book 'Jazz', made in the hill town of Vence.

Which museum holds Velázquez's 'Las Meninas' and the 'Black Paintings' Goya made on the walls of his house?

The Prado, in Madrid, got the Goya works after a later owner had them hacked off the walls and fixed to canvas. They were never commissioned and were not meant to leave his home.

Which new Paris dance hall did Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec advertise in an 1891 poster starring the dancer La Goulue?

Moulin Rouge posters probably ran to about 3,000 copies of the colour lithograph, and most were pasted up as adverts and lost. Her fellow dancer 'No-Bones' Valentin shares the bill.

Which Japanese artist took the polka dots that cover her canvases, rooms and performers from her own hallucinations?

Yayoi Kusama called her endless fields of dots 'infinity nets'. She first drew public attention in the late 1960s by staging happenings at which naked participants were painted with them.

Which pop artist hand-painted the Ben-Day dots of cheap printing in comic-style canvases such as 'Whaam!'?

Roy Lichtenstein won international recognition in the early 1960s for bold outlines and flat colours lifted from comic books and adverts. 'Look Mickey' and 'Drowning Girl' are among his best-known works.

Which New York artist first won notice writing cryptic 'SAMO' epigrams around Manhattan with schoolmate Al Diaz?

Jean-Michel Basquiat moved from street epigrams to canvases whose heads are often topped with crowns, hats and halos. He died of an accidental heroin overdose at 27.

Which Renaissance painter's fresco 'The School of Athens' puts Plato and Aristotle at the centre of a crowd of thinkers?

Raphael is believed to have slipped Michelangelo into the crowd as the brooding philosopher Heraclitus. The fresco was part of Pope Julius II's order to decorate his rooms in the Apostolic Palace.

Which US city's Millennium Park holds Anish Kapoor's mirror-polished steel sculpture 'Cloud Gate', nicknamed 'The Bean'?

Chicago's skyline bends across a surface of 168 stainless steel plates, welded and polished until no seams show. Kapoor, who took the form from liquid mercury, called the nickname 'completely stupid'.

Which former Air Force master sergeant hosted 'The Joy of Painting' on PBS from 1983 to 1994?

Bob Ross taught the quick wet-on-wet oil technique while repeating lines such as 'let's add some happy little trees'. He is estimated to have painted 30,000 pictures in his lifetime.

Which painter of 'The Fighting Temeraire' left about 300 oil paintings and thousands of sketches to the British nation?

J. M. W. Turner asked that a special gallery be built to house the bequest. A British art prize created in 1984 carries his name.

Which fish did Damien Hirst suspend in a glass tank of formaldehyde for a 1991 work paid for by Charles Saatchi?

Tiger shark, 14 feet long: it was preserved so poorly that it began to deteriorate and the liquid grew murky, so a new specimen replaced it in 2006.

Which abstract painter limited himself to the three primary colours, black lines and only horizontals and verticals?

Piet Mondrian's grids jumped from the gallery to the catwalk in 1965, when Yves Saint Laurent built a collection of shift dresses from the same blocks of colour bordered in black.

Which Netherlandish master painted the triptych 'The Garden of Earthly Delights', its centre flanked by Eden and hell?

Hieronymus Bosch left art historians divided over whether the central panel is a moral warning or a panorama of paradise lost. Opened out, the oak panels span nearly four metres.

Which Mexican muralist's Rockefeller Center fresco was destroyed after he refused to remove a portrait of Lenin?

Diego Rivera had added Lenin after a New York newspaper attacked the unfinished mural as 'anti-capitalist propaganda'. He painted a smaller replica in 1934, which survives in the Palacio de Bellas Artes.

Which American-born painter gave the portrait of his mother the formal title 'Arrangement in Grey and Black No. 1'?

James Whistler exhibited it in London in 1872 as an 'Arrangement', but the world knows it as 'Whistler's Mother'. The French state bought the picture in 1891, and it hangs in the Musée d'Orsay.

Which self-taught painter, nicknamed 'Le Douanier' for his job as a toll collector, became best known for jungle scenes?

Henri Rousseau did not travel: he found his jungles in the natural history museum and the botanical garden in Paris. Critics ridiculed him in his lifetime.

Which Italian Baroque painter fled Rome under a death sentence after killing Ranuccio Tomassoni in a 1606 brawl?

Caravaggio escaped to Naples with the sentence hanging over him. The dead man was a gangster from a wealthy family, and the killing may not have been intended.

Which former Wall Street commodities broker makes mirror-finish stainless steel sculptures of balloon animals?

Jeff Koons started from shop-bought objects, among them an inflatable rabbit, and remade them as highly polished steel pieces. His 'Rabbit' dates from 1986.

Which animal did Albrecht Dürer draw for a famous 1515 print without ever having seen one alive?

Rhinoceros: he worked from a written description and a brief sketch of one shipped to Lisbon, the first seen alive in Europe since Roman times. It later died in a shipwreck on its way to the Pope.

Which painter's 'Le Déjeuner sur l'herbe', a nude woman lunching with two dressed men, was rejected by the 1863 Salon?

Édouard Manet showed it instead at the Salon des Refusés, where it stirred notoriety and controversy. The woman is thought to be Victorine Meurent, who became his favourite model.

Which Berlin landmark did Christo and Jeanne-Claude wrap in silvery fabric and blue rope for two weeks in 1995?

The Reichstag project had been turned down three times over 24 years before the Bundestag approved it in 1994, by 292 votes to 223. It took 100,000 square metres of fabric.